Muckbeast

I am seriously thinking about going to GDC Online in Austin, TX this year.  As a game developer and owner of an independent gaming company, it is sometimes difficult to make solid industry contacts. My goal for attending would be to network with other colleagues in the industry, and perhaps meet people who could help our company in its goal to pursue venture capital/external investment.

Has anyone here ever been to GDC in Austin? If so, what did you think of it? Do you think it has value for an indie game dev/owner to attend for these purposes?

Primordiax will be hosting a crafting fair for both crafters and buyers on:

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010, 10pm EDT

The event will take place in the three inns of the main three cities:

Rolling Stone Inn – Askagard
The Skiffing Beetle – Chemer
The Gyrosmith Inn – Troj

Crafters, bring your wares to sell!

Adventurers, bring your coin to buy!

Website for details: http://www.primordiax.com

Wiki for world lore: http://wiki.primordiax.com

Click here to play immediately: http://play.primordiax.com

Every now and then I like to give a shout out to one of my writers over on Bright Hub when they do something particularly impressive.

Benjamin Sell has put together an incredibly set of guides for Red Dead Redemption. He has personally written a good 40+ mission guides, as well as a number of other general guides as well. If you play this game, then you definitely want to bookmark the main guide. If you don’t play the game, it is still worth checking out:

Ultimate Guide to Red Dead Redemption

And here is one that even the non-console gamers may find at least a bit interesting:

Sex and Nudity in Red Dead Redemption

The game looks pretty awesome, and I love the setting. I think the Old West is a very under utilized gaming setting. From everything I have read, Rockstar did their typical impressive job with th e game. I don’t really agree with the game having an actual ACHIEVEMENT for murdering a nun by tying her to train tracks though.

Have any readers played the game? If so, what do you think?

One of my Bright Hub writers recently wrote a very interesting article: WoW Character History.

What was most interesting was the sheer wealth of information that is available to players about OTHER players. History of guilds joined and left, gear, last time logged on, and more. Upon reading this article, I was actually shocked and would not want this much information about my characters available to other characters.

Some of these concerns were first raised when WoW went like with the WoW Armory. Blizzard even mocked it in one of their April Fools web pages. That mocking was out of place though when you look at how the armory has evolved. With the invention of Gearscore (a user addon that creates an actual, exact, numerical score for someone’s gear) it became possible for web sites to farm Armory data and develop minimum gearscores for certain instances or content. This in turn affected player perceptions, who would then run the user add on in game (or when looking up someone’s armory data) to decide if they were willing to team with someone. It even goes further than that – arguments on official forums would often devolve into someone looking up someone else’s guild or gear and using that as evidence they were a know-nothing “n00b.” This is just scratching the surface – I am sure readers here have even more examples of such uses.

It seems to me that MMOs are making more and more information about players and characters available to other players. Does anyone else think this is a bad way to go?

Primordiax had a “soft opening” on April 22. We didn’t publicize it much. We wanted to get a small group of early adopters in and then take their feedback and make improvements.

After a month and a half of that, we are ready for anyone and everything to flood the gates. Some basic information about Primordiax:

• Free to play.
• No downloads. No installation. Playable in your browser.
• Virtual World that players can affect in a real and permanent way: living, breathing, evolving ecosystem, a closed and fully player controlled economy, world technology that advances directly through community and player actions and decision making.
• Crafting system as deep and feature rich as traditional RPG combat systems.
• Deep combat system with enormous tactical variety: flanking, positional attacks, combos, group combos, and more.
• Custom artwork available for your character (created by our artists).
• Extremely detailed world lore that is built upon by both players and storyline staff.
• In Character Enforced (ICE) Environment with out of character channels.
• Double blind auction system for resources that serves as the backbone of the economy.
• Detailed skill and ability systems with skill synergies, hundreds of abilities and spells, and an unlimited respec/retraining system.
• Crafting characters actually earn their experience through crafting and selling goods. Support characters earn experience through support activities (healing, buffing, picking locks, etc.) as well as combat.
• Developed by Frogdice, a company with over 15 years of experience developing online role playing games.

Visit our…

Website for details: http://www.primordiax.com

Wiki for world lore: http://wiki.primordiax.com

or…

Click here to play immediately:  http://play.primordiax.com

Depending on who you ask or what you read, Macs continue to hover in the same 4-10% market share they have languished in for the last 20 years or so. No amount of marketing seems to make much of a difference.

In fact, if Apple spent a fraction of its marketing budget on making gaming viable on the Mac, one has to wonder if that would have seized more market share.

At long last, Apple has finally canceled their grossly counter-productive “Get a Mac” ads (more well known as Mac vs. PC ads). I have often wondered how much longer Apple would continue to give Microsoft/PCs free publicity. Years ago, the PC guy became far more loveable and endearing, and the Mac guy became more of a self-important, arrogant, douche.

For many people, the piss poor gaming support is a major reason people don’t even give Macs a second glance. For perhaps the first time in two decades, a revolution in the gaming industry is threatening to break down that wall: casual/web games. We all know how popular these are becoming, and finally they are games that Mac users can play as well. Then again, maybe Jobs and his hate for Flash will strangle this baby in the crib.

Would you be more likely to buy a Mac if it ran more games? Do you think the rise of social/web games is a major opportunity for the Mac to make aggressive gains in market share? Or is it all irrelevant, because no matter what happens Apple will always be their own worst enemy due to their obsession with proprietary standards and reliance on haughty snobbery to sell products?

This is a good issue that was raised on the Keen and Graev blog with their post: Guilds are simply too important.

I can definitely see where he is going with the argument, and I agree to a great extent.

There was a time on MMOs where a guild could be formed for any manner of reasons or purposes. It could be just friends and family. It could be for roleplay or story purposes. It could be for a theme like all-orcs or all-women or who knows what. But nowadays, unless you want to completely divorce yourself from any hope of meaningful “end game” participation, your guild is hugely important.

Whether it is raiding or RvR style PvP, you are almost required to be part of a large, effective, well organized guild with stringent membership requirements and all sorts of policies (DKP or others). All too often, players are faced with a very real and uncomfortable choice between guilding with friends they actually LIKE, or guilding with people who are good enough at the game to successfully partake in the same level of content.

Guilds have become too important. They have lost their purpose and have become a burdensome barrier to fully enjoying the gameplay and content in MMOs.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Raiding Sucks (click the picture for an even more disturbing image)

I have written about this topic many times before. The two biggest examples are:

Raiding Provides a False, Deceptive Sense of Real Accomplishment

Fed up! Raiding sucks as a sole form of end game content.

This would be a pretty dull post if all I was doing was encouraging you to go back and read those posts (though I do feel it is worth your while, as they are pretty good, and they provoked good discussions in the past). I bring those up because I am finally starting to see some of the same points being raised by a lot more MMO bloggers than in the past. It would appear I was at the forefront of this point, and I am very gratified to see it finally getting some traction.

I will cite a couple recent blog posts by Tobold, a well known, highly regarded MMO blogger (with a significant focus on WoW): Could you still dance with Heigan?

“What wiped raids in that encounter was the back and forth “dance” you had to perform correctly to avoid the floor erruptions, moving at exactly the right point in time, and neither too short nor too far.
…
And that is exactly what I don’t like about raiding in Wrath of the Lich King. There is no real “progression” from “easier” raid dungeons to “harder” raid dungeons. It is all just the same, various different encounters for which you and your friends have to practice the moves until you all can do them without fail. Places like Naxxramas become obsolete because of the loot they give, not because of a lack of challenge.”

and I don’t think Gearscore is the culprit here:

“The second factor is the nature of Wrath of the Lich King raiding, which I already discussed last week: Whether you play your character well, and even your gear, are not good predictors for the success of a raid encounter. The real difficulty of a WotLK raid encounter is “learning the dance”, practicing a fixed set of moves requiring sub-second reaction times.”

I have been making these points for years. I am glad other people are finally seeing it as well. The reason modern WoW/EQ style raiding is not actually epic or truly fun is because it is not about playing your character well – or even developing your character well. It is about following some rote set of moves designed by uber gamers who mastered the raid in beta before it was even released. You are all just puppets on a stage, following a Youtube script your raid leader downloaded and memorized. That is not fun. That is not epic. That is boring and dull.

1) Ryzom is now open source. WOW. All source code and art are being made available under an open source license. The Free Software Foundation provided additional details. There is also a detailed FAQ about what this all means. What I find most interesting here is the release of art assets (and possibly sound some time in the future). Creating these types of assets is one of the most difficult and expensive things for someone making a game.

2) Tom and Jerry MMO from Turner Interactive. WTF? It will supposedly be released first in India. Are Tom and Jerry super popular over there or something?

3) Study on assumptions gamers make about people based on the looks of their avatar.

This is definitely a handy site to help check your Facebook privacy settings and make sure they are what you want them to be.

ReclaimPrivacy.org

… when will games follow suit?

I hope never, but I fear that is a pointless hope. Last night I read this article: Google Stops Wi-Fi Mapping Project After “Mistakenly” Scoring Personal Data. It got me thinking about the accelerating violation of “customers’” private information for profit by so many companies out there.

Zynga has already gone down this path with so much of their gameplay based on nagging people into spamming their own friends about their games for free marketing.

Facebook and Google are legendary for it.

When will we have our first MMO that makes the gathering and selling of customer data a major part of their business model?

As a gamer, how much of this would you tolerate? And try to be honest, because the continued use of Facebook and Google by so many of us shows we are actually willing to tolerate quite a lot.

How do you think an MMO could successful move in this direction to make money without completely alienating their customers?

Bard's Tale Riddles and Puzzles

There are probably many other examples where the internet (or more specifically, the extreme easy access to virtually any information) has been detrimental to games and game design. I invite anyone to share their own examples. For purposes of this post, I am focusing on one.

In the 80s and early to mid 90s, there were many games that made use of riddles and puzzles that were solved through player skill, not character skill. It didn’t matter how smart your character was – if you, the player, were smart, you could figure out a riddle and really help your character(s) out in the game. Wizardry, Bard’s Tale, Might and Magic, and many other games were examples of this. Further, every time you replayed the game you would benefit from the fact that you could get past such riddles and puzzles instantly – often reaping significant reward.

With the rise of the internet, and even more specifically with the power of google, gamefaqs, game hint/cheat sites, etc. many (especially mainstream) game designers moved away from riddles like these. They exist, but they are pretty rare these days. Instead, they went with riddles that are only solved when your character has found specific clues, triggered certain locations, or executed specific dialog with the right NPCs.

More often, game challenges and puzzles focus on character skill or character stats. For example, in Mass Effect 2 there is a mission where you have to figure out who killed someone or stole something (for reasons I’ll explain later, I don’t really remember the details). The perpetrator can be one of a number of different people. You get clues by going to 5 specific locations, clicking on a computer terminal, and listening in to something and getting a hint. If you figure out the answer before listening to all 5 terminals, it doesn’t matter. You cannot solve the mission. You are only allowed to solve it by listening to all 5, then going back to the mission giver who then accepts your perfect knowledge. You cannot even mess up at that point by giving the wrong answer. Your character knows the answer, so your character gives it. You, the player, really don’t have to even pay attention. You just click the 5 terminals and move along. That’s why I barely remember the details. I didn’t bother paying attention because it was obvious it didn’t matter. In an old school game, I’d have had the option of answering right away and either getting it right (and getting a reward) or being wrong and failing the mission. Or I could get a few clues and then answer. On subsequent replays, I’d know the correct answer immediately and could just give it right away. Yay for player knowledge! (Standard caveats apply: I am not saying ALL riddles/puzzles should work this way. But it would be nice if more of them did.)

I can begrudgingly understand why game developers have done this. It is frustrating to have a cool riddle in your game and know that the instant many players happen upon it they will just google it and move on by. There was a time where knowing that really discouraged me from having riddles or puzzles at all. But now I say: “so what?” Unless the riddle is a gateway to some kind of exclusive content in a competitive multiplayer game, why does it matter?

I can tell you right now that I remember very, very few puzzles from RPGs of the last 10 years, but have vivid memories of the puzzles I solved from older RPGs that rewarded *MY* intelligence over that of my characters.

It would be really nice to see games return to rewarding player skill and intelligence rather than relying totally on character skill and intelligence. Ultimately, I think it makes for a deeper, more meaningful, and more memorable experience when your personal abilities and brains are vital to your success. Escapism is great in RPGs. It is wonderful to play characters who can do and accomplish things you would never be capable of. But it is also nice to be able to think “these avatars of mine are pretty tough, but without my intelligence guiding them, they’d still be stuck in that maze!”

Players often wonder how devs break things. They rant and rave and say things like “this worked yesterday, why can’t they just leave the things that work alone and work on new things instead.” What they don’t understand is that is a contradictory statement. I will give you a very simple example.

In Primordiax, I decided that I wanted to keep track of the “last location” any clone (a clone being any object – an item, a player, an NPC, etc. that exists in the game world). The last location would basically be the environment that it was in last, before it came to be in its current environment. For a player, this would be the last room you were in before your current room. For an item, this would be the room it was in before it was picked up, or the PC/NPC that was holding it before it was dropping in a room. Knowing the last location of something is useful for a variety of things. For PCs/NPCs it can be useful for knowing where to send them with a retreat command/spell, or a good place to send them if they somehow get stuck. For items, it is frequently interesting to know who held an item last when you are investigating it on the ground. There are a variety of divination spells that can potentially make use of that information.

So I added this feature in and everything was wonderful.

Until all of a sudden players started having trouble stacking similar items (like resources, animal body parts, etc.) in their inventory. They were unable to stack things manually with the stack command, but they were able to stack things if they dropped them and picked them both up – letting auto stacking do the work.

Fortunately, since Primordiax is new and is primarily played by excited early adopters and very few (if any) jaded, grumpy people, nobody got freaked out about this problem. On an older game, something like this would very likely result in the complaint I mentioned at the beginning: “stacking worked fine yesterday, why did you mess with it? Work on new things rather than tinkering with stacking!!!!11!!!one!!”

But as you know from reading this, I wasn’t messing with stacking. I was actually adding a new feature that would then make a number of additional player abilities or spells possible. The problem was, when the “last_location” variable was set on items, that meant that two different stacks of an item could potentially have a different data value for that variable. One stack of ore might have a last_location of one location (the place you harvested that stack of ore), whereas another stack of ore would have a different last_location setting from wherever it was harvested. The stacking code is coded such that you cannot stack two items that have different data settings. That’s because different data (other than quantity, which is ignored) means the two stacks/items might have different quality or some other important data that you don’t want to be wiped away when it gets merged in with a similar stack.

So the problem here was that I forgot to make “last_location” an ignored type of data just like stacking ignores “quantity.” The reason it appeared to players that auto stacking was fine was because once they dropped the two items on the ground, those two items would then have the same “last_location” once they were picked up.

The moral of the story is this: it is very easy for things to get broken in totally unpredictable ways when devs are indeed working on “new stuff.” Players should try to keep that in mind. MMOs are not single player games. Their code, just like their communities, live, breathe, and grow. That means growing pains sometimes.

One of the biggest reasons I am a huge proponent of the F2PV$ (Free to play, virtual currency) model is that it is much easier to lure back your customers. They can return at any time with little or no barrier to entry (possibly just the download of a patch or a re-download of your client). If your customer is doing some everyday activity and suddenly it reminds them of something that happened in your game, they can go home that night and login. They don’t have to decide about renewing a subscription or forking over money just to see “how things are going.”

Subscription MMOs often run various promotions and events to try and lure people back. Sometimes they are called re-activation weekends. Often these events coincide with other special events like double XP (note this), new content, special events, etc.

A few days ago I received an email from LOTRO trying to convince me to return. Among the amazing incentives were:

1. 5% bonus xp.
2. Free stable master travel.
3. Collect tokens from defeated monsters and trade them in for special rewards.
4. Play your old characters.
5. Play LOTRO for $9.99 a month

Lets break that down a bit. #4 and #5 are kinda stupid to even list there. #4 is freakin’ obvious, and #5 is the same price everyone pays…. yipee. #2 is functionally irrelevant. Even as a lowbie I never even paid attention to stable master travel. #3 is vague, and might be interesting, but most likely the rewards are meh or silly.

So the big lure, and the thing they listed FIRST, is the “whopping” 5% bonus XP.

Who is the idiot marketing buffoon who came up with this idea and rammed it home?

Who in the heck is going to give a crap about 5% bonus XP?

I cannot remember the last time I saw a major MMO have an xp related event that was not 50% or more bonus XP. The common bonus is DOUBLE XP (+100%).

Does anyone know someone at Turbine they can ask about this? Because this has to be one of the most laughable MMO promotions I’ve ever read.

But to make this more than mocking LOTRO’s promotion, let us also discuss the larger issue:

1. How important do you think it is, and how much focus should be put on, luring back former customers at an MMO?
2. What methods do you think are likely to be most effective at doing so?

After many, many years of (too frequently interrupted) development, Primordiax officially launched on Thursday, April 22, 2010. Primordiax is a hybrid text and graphical MUD/MMO with a primary focus on providing a true virtual world experience. While Primordiax does feature some traditional MMO game aspects (combat, loot, gear, etc.), that is just one part of the game. The crafting system is as deep and intricately designed as combat. Mini-games (collecting, fishing, scavenging, and more) and role playing are also enormously significant aspects of the game. Housing, clans, businesses, politics, religion, territory, etc. are all player controlled game elements. The world itself will be continually shaped and transformed by players. For example, players as a whole will consistently “level up the world” to unlock new technologies and features that can potentially affect everyone.

Primordiax is not RP required, but it is In Character Enforced (ICE). This means within the game world, characters must stay in character (IC). We do, however, have clearly separated out of character (OOC) modes of communication. To facilitate this, Primordiax has a very deep recognition system that includes nametags, introductions, dishonest introductions, etc.

I could go on and on about the game’s features, but checking out our website and wiki are your best sources of information. The amount of lore available on the wiki gives you an idea of how seriously we take the virtual world aspects of the game.

http://www.primordiax.com

http://wiki.primordiax.com

You can jump in and play right in your browser: http://play.primordiax.com

The headline:

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group Acquires Turbine, Inc. North America’s Largest Privately-Held Online Gaming Studio

That says it all basically. Turbine, one of the biggest privately owned MMO developers is no more. For those of you that don’t know, Turbine is responsible for Asheron’s Call, the now defunct Asheron’s Call 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Lord of the Rings Online. 3 out of 4 is pretty darn good.

None of their games really suited me, but in the 1-2 months I played LOTRO it definitely seemed like a quality game.

Congratulations to Turbine I guess… I imagine the primary shareholders and founders made a nice chunk of change. Personally, I am sad to see another gaming studio that had at least SOME independence get gobbled up.

Well, maybe this just creates more opportunity for the indie studios. What do you think?

This happens more often than I’d like, and it happened today. A player was doing a repeatable crafting task on Primordiax. He had to make 5 copper plates and then turn them into to Garen – an armorcrafter in Chemer. He has done the task before and it worked fine. But today after taking 3 plates it broke. He then dropped the task, retook it, made 5 more plates, and it worked fine. In other words, the bug “fixed itself.”

Do I rejoice that the bug is fixed? Heck no. This just means a nasty bug is lurking, waiting to break again at some inopportune time that will frustrate the heck out of some player.

Apparently, trashing Farmville was the trendy thing to do at the recent GDC (Game Developers Conference). The discussion and trashing have continued on various game developer blogs as well. The common arguments include: “these aren’t games”, “these games suck”, “this is a fad”, “these companies are scammers”, etc. The common fears include: “this is the future of the industry”, “all games will be like this eventually”, “games for core gamers are a dinosaur”, etc.

Right away, I am going to answer the question in the topic: No.

People love games. People love computer/video games. The number of people who love computer games continues to grow. The gaming industry is thriving and will continue to grow, expand, thrive, and include more and more people. Television and movies need to look out because computer/video games provide almost everything they provide, plus interactivity. (However, they don’t have to fear for their lives. Just like casual/social games won’t kill other types, television and movies provide a type of entertainment that is unique enough that many people will continue to enjoy and prefer it.)

Very few forms of legitimate entertainment get wiped out when something new comes along. The new just adds to the old, and the overall quotient of happiness increases. As I noted in a previous blog post, the Rubik’s Cube just turned 30 years old and has sold 350 million units. People still love the thing. I play Uno with one of my kids almost every day. I watch TV. I watch movies. I read books. I listen to the radio. I go for walks. I play catch. I ride my bike. The fact that we, as a species, have more and more entertainment options as our planet spins upon its axis is a GOOD THING.

Zynga is a wildly successful juggernaut that uses a variety of questionable business practices to succeed in the market with products of dubious quality. Right now, many (if not most) people think they are an unassailable titan that will continue to dominate its sector of the industry and perhaps crowd out others. Their own staff are becoming increasingly arrogant about it (perhaps as a defensive mechanism). When a Farmville developer was booed and heckled during his acceptance of the social game award at GDC, he fired back with “we’re hiring” and various other snide comments that amounted too “when you chumps are done being artists, come work for us and make money.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like AOL to me. How many of my readers are viewing this blog while logged onto the internet through AOL? Zero? Yeah, I thought so. AOL’s primary profitable business now is TMZ if I am not mistaken (yes, that’s how far they have fallen).

The power of social games like Farmville is that it let people play games with people they like (friends, family, etc.) that they probably never thought they’d game with – ever.  Parents gaming with their kids, grandparents gaming with grandchildren, and people gaming with high school friends they haven’t spoken to in 20 years are all pretty amazing things. The fact that some of the actual games that accomplished this are weak from a game design standpoint is not really the point.

Competition will come to this space, and crappy (at least in my opinion) games like Farmville won’t be able to compete. Zyngas will have to raise their standards. The same thing happened to AOL. In AOL’s case, they didn’t evolve so they died (as far as their ISP business).

Core games will continue to be made. AAA, multi-million dollar budget games will continue to be made. FPSes and fantasy MMORPGs will keep getting made. As long as there are people who like them enough to spend money on them, they will get made.

Farmville has grown the market for games, and in the end that is a good thing. This is similar to what The Sims did to help grow the gaming market – though admittedly The Sims is a high quality game in its own right. This is a good thing for us, people. Relax.

Readers are always asking me to share some actual insight into the game development process. I always worry that it might be boring for people. I’ll give it a shot though:

Integers are great. For those of you not familiar with integers, they are basically positive or negative whole numbers: 1, 2, 3, -1, -2, -3, etc. Integers do not have decimal places. In programming, you tend to use integers more than any other kind of number because computers handle them best. Decimals (or floating point numbers) require more memory to store and more processing power to work with.

But integers are not always great. For example, take the market (auction house) I have been working on for Primordiax. Assume a base listing fee of 5% of the value of the item being sold. Now assume you are selling the item for 10 triads. 5% is less than 1 unit. So how do you deduct less than 1 of something from someone? You can’t. So I have to round up to make it work, which means the listing fee is 1. (Just so you know, in computer integer math, remainders are always rounded down. Thus, 4.9 becomes 4.) So while it was supposed to be 5%, it is now effectively 10%.

Another example. Assume you have damage resistance of 20%. You are hit for 12 pts of damage. You don’t avoid 2.4 damage, you only avoid 2 damage. So instead of 20%, you only got 16% damage resistance. For this amount of damage, your resistance could go as high as 23% and you would still only resist 2 points. So in the end, for this amount of damage, 16-23% damage resistance are effectively the same.

What is the solution? Usually the solution is to just work with bigger numbers. When I was confronted with the above problems, this is how I solved it:

1) I changed the triad currency to be 100 times larger. It is a bank/economic currency only, so players convert other currencies they actually find in game to triads. The base conversion rate of those currencies was 1:1 (1 danar, drocta, or sathu = 1 triad). Eventually the economy and currencies will float with demand, but that is another issue. I changed it from 1:1 to 1:100. So 1 danar, drocta, or sathu will now convert into 100 triad.

This still means someone could potentially sell something for 5 triad and get hit with the same problem, but it is less likely since 5 triad is kinda like 5 cents in a world where people rarely buy things for less than at least a dollar.

2) I multiplied all player and mob hp by 10, and also all DPS and damage formulas by 10. Fortunately, I centralized by DPS and damage formulas in a single daemon early on (so I could easily make changes to how damage formulas worked) so this was not super difficult.

You could argue I cheated, I guess. The same problem still lurks in the depths of the game’s formulas, but at least now the effect is much smaller and thus far less noticeable.

Anyway, these are the types of issues that may seem pretty trivial but actually end up taking significant developer thought and effort when working on games.